Last week, Google announced the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, who will work to solve complex language processing problems, among other things. In aninterview last year, Kurzweil pointed out that language processing issues are among the most difficult problems to solve. Kurzweil will join the same company that employs Franz Och, the mastermind behind Google Translate (both were interviewed for my new book, Found in Translation). This is extremely important news — far more important than most people realize.

Google Translate is not just a tool that enables people on the web to translate information, although that’s how people know it on the surface. It’s a strategic tool for Google itself. Google’s self-declared mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s impossible for Google to accomplish this without translation. In fact, translation is one of the most critical components of this mission. The world’s information cannot be accessible if it’s locked up in languages that people cannot understand. The only way to unlock that information is through translation.

In addition, for people to access that information, translating text is simply not enough. Of the 6,000 to 7,000 languages used in the world today, only 2,261 have a writing system. However, virtually all languages are spoken or signed. Google has already shown success at mashing up technologies that first recognize speech and convert it to text, then translate that text into another language, and finally spit it back out in another spoken language. However, even Google’s best attempts — like those of other companies — need a lot of refinement before they truly cross the threshold into accessible, let alone useful.

Indeed, useful is an important word to look at when trying to understand the importance of translation in Google’s mission statement. What does it really mean for information to be useful to people? It means that they can understand it easily and readily, in their preferred communication styles, so that they can do something with it. The implications of this are vast and go beyond mere language translation. More.

See: Huffington Post